Ryeish Green head teacher Jenny Garner campaigned to keep the school open

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A Spencers Wood school will shut its doors for good this week after council bosses controversially agreed to close the facility more than three years ago.

Lewis Rudd spoke with the school’s departing headteacher to find out how morale is within the camp while learning that many are still upset at the decision to bring 100 years of teaching at the school to an end.

Staff at a soon-to-be-closed Wokingham school are still angry with education bosses who took the decision to close the school more than three years ago, the headteacher has said.

Jenny Garner has told The Wokingham Times how she also believes bosses at Wokingham Borough Council will one day “live to regret” taking the decision to close Ryeish Green School in Hyde End Lane.

At the end of the current term, on Thursday, the secondary school will cease all educational operations after the Conservative-controlled authority unanimously approved closing the school back in May 2007.

The then-executive committee took the decision to close the school after failing to grant it trust status, meaning those 16-year-olds leaving to seek further education or employment this year will be its last.

The school, which has been at the site since April 1910, also failed to tie up a similar trust status through a working partnership with the educational charity CfBT.

Mrs Garner, however, still stands by her remarks the school has been closed for political reasons rather than educational ones.

She also believes the council may have missed the opportunity to keep the school open as one of its four strategic development locations earmarked within the Core Strategy document sits in close proximity to Ryeish.

Should plans to build thousands of homes in the area go ahead the catchment area may well point in the direction of the school planned for a similar development at Arborfield Garrison, although she questions if it will ever be built, given the current economic climate.

The headteacher, who has kept watch over the school for the past nine years, also refuses to talk about the school in the past tense.

“We haven’t finished yet,” she said.

“Staff morale is still very good and the students remain very focused, and we still have the GCSE presentation evening in October to look forward to.

“The staff are still very angry, though, at the council’s decision because we didn’t want them to close the school, which I believe is more for a political reason rather than for educational ones.

“But we have been living with this decision for three years now and we have worked really hard to see it through.

“We won’t be going out as a failed school.”

Mrs Garner went on to say how the majority of her teaching staff had gone on to successfully find recruitment at schools elsewhere, while others are still looking.

Since the decision was taken to close the school and its last round of new admissions being welcomed in September 2008, the younger pupils have slowly been filtered out to other secondary schools in the Wokingham borough.

The last batch of these, its Year Nine pupils, left the school at the turn of the year – leaving just the remaining Year 11 pupils to see out the full five year cycle and concentrate on their GCSE examinations.

When leaving the school, however, Mrs Garner will also be walking out on a 38-year career in teaching – as she plans to retire and “play golf” once she completes a part-time job with the authority working in a role with apprenticeships.

She said: “I plan to retire and play golf. I started teaching in 1972 and have spent the last nine years at Ryeish and loved it.

“I think people are going to be generally and pleasantly surprised by our results this year and this summer we will be going out on a high, rather than going out as a failing school.

“We have already got some students up to seven GCSEs or more and we are going to get more this time around.

“We were also the first school to enter our students early into exams in Wokingham – which is in line with our vocational objections.

“We have always been a innovative school. This decision is one Wokingham Borough Council may well in due course come to regret.”

The then executive at Wokingham Borough Council unanimously backed the closure plans in May 2007 after a consultation process was launched following concerns about the lack of children making the step up to the school.

Falling pupil numbers sparked the consultation after just 91 pupils out of a possible 210 capacity were enrolled at the school in one academic year.